SHEBOYGAN – A Sheboygan County judge on Wednesday rejected a motion to suppress evidence in a case slated for trial next week involving a kennel where officials last June reported finding dogs without food or water and dozens more dead inside freezers.

Christy Rose Tuchel, the owner of the former Kinship Companions kennel where county sheriff’s and humane society officials last June reported finding the animals, is expected to appear for trial beginning Tuesday.

Two other defendants, Breanna Ambrielle Mikula and Anthony James Keyport, convinced Judge L. Edward Stengel earlier this week to delay their trials by at least several months. Both are expected to appear for trial beginning in August.

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Anthony James Keyport is expected to appear for trial later this year in a case involving alleged animal mistreatment at the former Kinship Companions dog kennel.(Photo: Gary C. Klein/Sheboygan Press Media)

Stengel on Wednesday rejected efforts to suppress evidence after Gary R. George, Tuchel’s lawyer, argued the state had hampered his defense by destroying the freezers and their contents shortly after last year’s search at the kennel.

“There was absolutely no reason to destroy the evidence," George said at a hearing Wednesday morning.

District attorney Joel Urmanski disagreed, and cited what he said was a legal precedent that evidence like the freezers in question or the dogs they contained didn’t necessarily need to be preserved in all cases.

“For law enforcement, there was no reason to believe there was any value in them,” Urmanski, who has prosecuted cases against Tuchel and the other two defendants since last year, said of the freezers — which were reportedly inoperable and filled with decaying dogs when officials found them.

The judge sided with the prosecutor, saying he saw no reason to believe the freezers could have provided any evidence that could help Tuchel’s case.

The three defendants were charged last year after Sheboygan County sheriff’s deputies reported finding 36 dogs without food — only one had water — inside the former kennel in the rural town of Wilson, just south of Sheboygan. Investigators also reported finding an estimated 31 to 41 dead dogs inside the freezers.

All three were charged with a felony for being party to mistreatment of animals, along with 36 misdemeanors for failing to provide food and drink to animals. Tuchel and Keyport are also each facing a felony for causing mental harm to a child, a charge tied to alleged conditions a teenager faced while reportedly working at the kennel.

George on Wednesday said he wasn't willing yet to surrender a possible challenge against some of those charges, which he'd earlier sought to dismiss after claiming criminal complaints last year hadn’t sufficiently identified dogs found living on and seized from the kennel.

Urmanski offered to update the charges by identifying each canine by name. Stengel, who gave Urmanski until Friday to complete the update, asked George whether that would satisfy him.

“I don’t know until I see it,” George answered, noting he didn’t want to give up his right to challenge the charges until after seeing them amended.

Other trials pushed back

Trials for all three defendants had been slated to run at the same time, but attorneys for Mikula and Keyport successfully pressed for delays after offering various reasons why they couldn’t appear next week.

Mikula had surgery last Friday and her recovery required re-hospitalization, George, who is representing both Mikula and her mother, Tuchel, wrote in a court filing this week. (George also tried to postpone Tuchel’s trial, saying in the same filing that she’d been caring for Mikula and was dealing with her own medical complications.)

Keyport’s newly hired attorney, meanwhile, requested a delay last week, citing “voluminous” evidence he still had to sift through after he’d been hired just weeks before Keyport’s trial had been set to begin.